The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
A CLARE-BASED tour guide has caused outrage with an ill-judged attempt at April Fools humour on its Facebook page.
Visit Doolin has come under fire after its post late on March 31 referencing attempted suicide and health and safety measures at a local cliffs attraction.
The post attracted hundreds of comments on April 1 expressing disgust at the insensitive content.
As of April 2, it was still live on the page with an acknowledgement that read,
“Hi Fans, it seems one of our members posted an April 1st post, while humour was intended it may have caused offence to some. If anyone was offended, I will take any flak.”
The post was signed by a ‘Niamh’, but the original post remained live for some time after.
One of the over 550 responses to the post said, “If you think this post is funny please take a moment to reevaluate. We have such a high suicide rate in our country and this post just laughs in the faces of families who have lost ones to suicide…vile.”
As angry comments and complaints continued to mount throughout the morning the Facebook page, which had some 14,700 followers, was temporarily removed.
By Friday afternoon, however, the page had reappeared without the offending posts.
It had listed itself as a local travel website with a number of businesses in the north Clare village featured on its site and is linked to a website called www.visitdoolin.ie.
Efforts to reach a number listed on the site proved unsuccessful.
